UK Election 2024: July 4th Means Independence from the Tories

This week the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, set the date for a general election for July 4th. My original headline for this post was "About Damn Time", but I decided instead to go with a play on words relating to the US's Independence Day. This Tory government has been a disaster, and it's time the UK broke the shackles and liberated itself from their haphazardly misrule.

I say "this" Tory government, but which do we mean? There's the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government that ruled from 2010 to 2015; the Tories ruling on their own under David Cameron from 2015 to 2016, when he had to resign after the Brexit referendum turned out for Leave; the Theresa May government that lasted from 2016 to 2019; the Boris Johnson government that held the reins through the Covid pandemic until 2022; Liz Truss's 45-day tenure in 2022; and finally, Rishi Sunak's government, which has been in power since then.

In that time, other than the 2010 general election that brought the Tories to power after 13 years of Labour rule under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, there have been three general elections, in 2015 (which gave Cameron's Tories enough of a majority to rule without the Liberal Democrats), in 2017 (to cement Theresa May's position post-Brexit vote, but ended up forcing them to team with Northern Ireland's DUP), and finally in 2019, when Boris Johnson faced off with Labour under Jeremy Corbyn and returned a pretty strong majority.

They've all been pretty terrible. We might look back at the pre-2015 days as a beacon of stability - and they were - but those five years saw the Tories pretty much run roughshod over their coalition partners as they slashed public services, cut welfare benefits and raised university tuition fees. I was in the UK for the first three years of their term, and I remember the student protests at the tuition rises, which went from about £3,000 a year to over £9,000 - that might seem laughable to us in the US, where you have to fork out much more than that even to attend public universities, but consider that tuition tripled from one year to the next, effectively putting higher education out of reach for a certain amount of families.

That period was notable because the Tories had come to power on a wave of excitement about their young, dynamic new leader, Cameron, who urged people to call him Dave and seemed to court the votes of the bien-pensant sections of the electorate by biking to Parliament and installing a wind turbine on his home. He seemed to position himself as a sort of Conservative Obama, and he also benefited from anger at the chaos caused by the 2008 global recession - stuff like that always blows back against the government in power, and a significant portion of UK voters in 2010 seemed to blame Gordon Brown for the recession.

Never mind that it was actually caused by bank deregulation and risky behavior by investment bankers, plus the infamous sub-prime mortgages and credit default swaps. Voters were pissed off at their lost jobs and cratered portfolios, and they needed someone to punish. The sad thing is that they punished possibly the one politician, Brown, who was best-placed to cushion the UK's fall.

There was some idea that Cameron's Tories had shed the "nasty party" label that's always dogged the Conservatives, but he immediately started talking tough about "benefit scroungers" and illegal immigrants. In 2013 his Home Office secretary, Theresa May, approved a campaign where vans inviting illegal immigrants to go home or face arrest drove around.

This same kind of atmosphere led Cameron to call a referendum on whether the UK should stay in the EU or not. When it blew up in his face, he resigned, leaving the UK to enjoy May's premiership and everything that followed. May's time was pretty chaotic, as she found herself trying to negotiate a Brexit deal that would actually deliver on the Leave campaign's (false) promises, and having to fight against her own party multiple times in the process. Part of the problem was that, notwithstanding promises to avoid a "hard" Brexit, the other option was taking on a similar status to Norway or Switzerland, which meant following directives from Brussels - which they'd been doing before 2016, but with the crucial difference that, as members, the UK could actually influence those policies.

When May resigned, Johnson became the Tory leader and promptly won a landslide election against Corbyn, painting him as a dangerously loony socialist. This delivered the famous Red Wall Tories, i.e. those who stood for constituencies that had voted Labour (ergo "red") for generations, in part because of fears that a Corbyn government would immediately rejoin the EU.

Johnson faced two big crises in his premiership, the pandemic and the Ukraine war. Neither was his fault, and the latter allowed him room to actually behave in a moderately statesmanlike way, by becoming one of Ukraine's most vocal defenders. Of course, this was after decades of the UK turning a blind eye to Russian oligarchs with ties to Putin turning London into their own playground; on top of that, the war kinda saved Johnson's bacon, by diverting attention from the scandal that arose when it emerged that he'd broken his own lockdown rules to host parties at 10 Downing Street.

His handling of the pandemic was pretty awful, even apart from Partygate, as it became known. He was probably the first major leader to catch Covid, and his government's inability to settle on a policy (lockdowns vs herd immunity) led to way more cases and deaths than was necessary. Indeed, the only advanced economy that did worse was the US, which had its own mismanagement going on.

I could go on about Liz Truss and the shenanigans surrounding Rishi Sunak, but I don't have all night. The main point is to sum up the chaos that the UK has suffered as a result of this succession of Tory governments. Cameron's pitch in 2015 was that Labour would cause too much chaos, but in the end he destroyed the UK's biggest trade agreement, which has led to decreasing international confidence in the UK and gutted investment. Immigration has soared, even though the aim of Brexit was to kick the foreigners out, and UK businesses have a hell of a time exporting to the Continent. Brexit also almost destroyed the Northern Ireland peace accords of 1998, which depended on both Ireland and the UK being EU members, so there wouldn't be a hard border between the Republic and Northern Ireland.

For me, the original sin is Brexit, and everything bad comes back to that. Liz Truss may have taken just 45 days to tank the economy with unfunded tax cuts, but she wouldn't even have been in the conversation for PM if the Brexit referendum hadn't happened. Likewise with Sunak's signature policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda - if Labour had won any of those elections from 2010 on, he wouldn't have been there to implement this cruel policy.

So when I say that this upcoming general election signals independence from the Tories, I'm hoping that it breaks the back of the Conservative party for another few election cycles, just like Blair's 1997 victory did. I'm not naive enough to think that it'll destroy the Tories as a party, or naive enough to think that they'd be replaced by a more sensible center-right party.

But I do hope that it sends the worst, most xenophobic elements like Lee Anderson or Suella Braverman or Priti Patel packing from Parliament, never to be seen again. As a friend pointed out on Facebook when I posted about this very subject today, it could hopefully be an opportunity to introduce a more progressive voting system, which would give more representation to parties beyond just Labour and the Conservatives. At the very least, they could get ranked choice voting, which was the Lib Dems' pet project in 2010 and the main thing that the Tories bulldozed cynically to destroy their coalition partners.

Beyond that, I'm reminded of conversations I had with friends in the lead-up to the 2010 election. Some were so angry at Brown and Labour that they asked things like, "Who'd vote for Labour now?" I even remember seeing an article somewhere suggesting that saying you planned to vote Labour was enough to get you ostracized from your friend groups in some circles. Even back then I could see that Cameron's "call me Dave" act was false, and that they'd just pick up where Margaret Thatcher and John Major's policies left off.

Fourteen years later, I'm absolutely not above saying, I told you so.

X-Men 97: Probably Marvel's Best Offering Since Iron Man (more spoilers)

So here's why I usually wait until I finish a show before blogging about it here. In the past I've written about shows I was watching, while I was currently watching them. I've never had a Battlestar Galactica style crack-up between post and end-of-show, but the danger's always there.

With X-Men 97, the danger is the exact opposite. When I wrote my original post, I'd only seen two episodes and the show hadn't really taken off, as it were. I was cautiously optimistic, but not prepared to rave about it.

That's now changed. Largely on the strength of the fifth episode, Remember It, I'm prepared to call this season the best thing Marvel's put out since Iron Man, back in 2008. The comparison isn't entirely fair, because there have been individual MCU movies I've liked since then (Avengers, Civil War) but it does reflect the drift the MCU's been suffering from - compared to that, X97 is admirably cohesive and well-structured.

So let's get some quibbles out of the way first. When I say X97 is cohesive, that kind of ignores the fourth episode, the double-header of Lifedeath and Motendo. Lifedeath (and its sequel, Lifedeath II, which was the sixth episode) is a classic story, a quiet moment amid the chaos where Storm reckons with the loss of her powers and her complicated feelings toward Forge, whose technology cost her those powers.

I wasn't sure that giving Lifedeath barely 10 minutes of runtime was the right decision, nor that having Storm reclaim her powers so quickly worked either. It isn't to say that either episode is done badly, but more that the power-loss story doesn't really get to breathe. Storm leaves the mansion in Episode 2, doesn't appear in Episode 3, we see Lifedeath for half of Episode 4, and then she comes back again in Episode 6, where she regains her powers.

I don't want to be churlish, because for one thing, it's amazing to see these classic stories from the comics get the TV treatment. For another, the beats of the stories, while different from the comics, are broadly pretty satisfying. Lifedeath II is basically not at all an adaptation of the story from the comics (where Ororo is finding herself in Africa and comes to terms with her loss of powers, rather than regaining them), but it still does right by her, showing how strong she is as a character.

However, if I had to point to something wrong with this show, it's that: the classic stories are referenced but not always explored in depth. The original show had the advantage of more episodes per season, so it could do 4 or 5-parters like the Phoenix saga, and that would be unfair to expect of this show, with its 10-episode order. But the original comics were better able to set up storylines across a long time, so we got to go into a lot of the characters' motivations and relationships. That said, there are some amazing character moments here, like where Morph confesses their love for Wolverine, or where Jean and Storm have a good sisterly moment before they kick all the ass.

Overall, Motendo is really the one dispensable story here. It was nice to see Mojo (to the extent that I like Mojo stories, which isn't much), but I don't feel like it gave a sense of either Roberto or Jubilee's characters. As I read more of the original Mojo stories, I might have to revisit it, but for the moment, I'm glad it only got 10 minutes or so of runtime.

But back to the positives! In my previous post, I wondered if we were going to see any Grant Morrison or Jonathan Hickman stories, and I now have my answer. Remember It is basically a street-level view of E is for Extinction, the storyline that Morrison opened their run with, and it really fucking works. There's a lot of emotional and relationship business in the first half, as we see Rogue and Gambit dealing with the Magneto love triangle, but then Cable shows up trying to avert some catastrophe and then basically everyone gets killed.

Part of the reason it's so audacious is that the previous four episodes didn't really prepare us for the sight of the Wild Sentinel vaporizing everyone. We see Banshee and Archangel get killed, Madelyne Pryor and Callisto are confirmed dead, and even poor Leech (one of my favorite minor characters) dies horribly, despite Magneto's best efforts. This is a big difference from the Quiet Council scenes at the start of the episode (and there's our Krakoa reference: Sebastian Shaw, Emma Frost, Moira MacTaggert and everyone sitting together and governing an island nation for mutants).

The rest of the show maintains the momentum of Remember It, and works in commentaries on alt right intolerance and the cynicism of the news cycle. Bastion - who's revealed to be the season's big bad - explains at one point that the attack on Genosha was necessary to deaden the sympathy the mutants had built up since Xavier's disappearance: by killing so many at once, Genosha just became a news item that could be superseded. There's a bit of a chilling resonance with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza there.

The fact that Bastion is the big bad is another of this show's strengths. The original show could only play with the storylines and characters from 1963 to 1997, but this can hop forward, giving us references to Krakoa, E is for Extinction and Operation Zero Tolerance, not to mention Fatal Attractions. There are possibilities of Age of Apocalypse and other storylines in coming episodes, given that the final episode ends with half the team in Apocalypse's past, Scott and Jean in his future, and the man himself unearthing one of Gambit's playing cards in the rubble of Genosha, hinting at the storyline where Gambit became the Horseman of Death.

The thirty years since I stopped reading (I consider it that, though I was there for most of Morrison's run) are a worrying tangle for me, so I'm hoping the show can make sense of it all. The 90s, in particular, seems to be held up as the X-Men's worst time, just because they had so many bad storylines and writers who didn't know what to do with certain characters (usually the women).

It's also significant because of all the Marvel cameos in the second half of the season. I never watched the 90s Spiderman show, or the other programs referenced here, but apparently they're all canon to this show, and we get to see a bunch of other characters, like Daredevil. This is important because of the way that Marvel was essentially erasing the X-Men during the heyday of the MCU, just because they didn't want to boost the Fox X-Men franchise. So while I'm glad that X97's show runners have cooled rumors that this is part of the MCU, it's also good to see the X-Men being embraced once again as part of the wider Marvel Universe.

On that note, the question is now how the House of X will integrate into the existing MCU. Deadpool and Wolverine is expected to hint at it this summer, but that's also going to turn on the multiverse concept that's been driving the MCU since Endgame. There's an X-Men movie in the works, but I'm hoping that its creative team takes its cues from X97 - they shouldn't follow the cartoon slavishly, but they should keep its obvious love for the characters and storylines, and take into account that X-Men is about the characters as a family, rather than just a vehicle for Wolverine.

It's been 4 years since we last had an X-Men movie (New Mutants), and there's been very little mention in the MCU's 16 year run, apart from the odd Easter egg or post-credits scene. But now that all of Marvel's characters are back under its control, I'm looking forward to seeing the X-Men take their rightful place as Marvel's premier characters.

And it'd be nice to see Beau DeMayo involved in some way, given his deep love and knowledge of the characters.

Shogun: Early Candidate for Best Show of 2024

I just finished Shogun and the thought struck me, that this is probably the standout show for me of 2024. One may qualify that with phrases like "so far", but it's hard to see what's going to surpass it. BTW, there are likely to be spoilers in this post, so proceed with caution.

When I first heard about a new adaptation of the James Clavell novel, I wasn't exactly skeptical, but I didn't think of starting on it straight away. As I've mentioned, I fear I'm going to lose access to Hulu soon, so I'm trying to be very careful about which shows I start watching there and on Disney Plus. I was watching something else when Shogun started, so I didn't want to start a completely new show.

But then I started seeing and hearing comments about how good it was. My mom said it was great, and so did Craig Mazin, one of the hosts of Scriptnotes (and, as the guy who wrote HBO's Chernobyl and The Last of Us, he knows a good TV show when he sees one). When I heard Mazin's recommendation, I immediately checked it out, that very evening.

In terms of the plot, it's probably not the most groundbreaking or pulse-pounding premise I've ever seen. Though Shogun is kind of the grandaddy of the "Westerner goes to Japan and becomes a samurai" genre. That said, the characters are mostly fascinating - Hiroyuki Sanada is particularly good as Lord Toranaga, the scheming warlord who drives much of the politicking of the show. Toranaga is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, the warlord who essentially brought Japan under his control in the 1600s, so you can see how the show is informed by historical fact, if not exactly a perfect recreation of it.

Anna Sawai is also excellent as the doomed love interest, Lady Mariko, of our POV character John Blackthorne (played by Cosmo Jarvis). Because she's a Christian (specifically a Catholic), she acts as an interpreter for Blackthorne throughout, though there are multiple interesting strands to their relationship. For one thing, as an Anglican he's considered a heretic by the Portuguese, who have converted a number of locals to Catholicism, and Mariko shares some of this religious distaste for him.

They also predictably have a romantic relationship, which is accompanied by her guilt at her estrangement from her overbearing husband, whom she believes dead for a while. On top of all that, Mariko has a tragic past as the daughter of an accused traitor, which diminishes her in the eyes of her husband but also means she's able to connive along with Toranaga to achieve his aims of control over the Imperial Heir and of all of Japan. Sawai plays the conflicts in the character very well throughout, especially when she acts as the intermediary between Toranaga and Blackthorne's sparring.

For me, the star of the show isn't a specific character or actor, but rather the set design. The mansions and castles and villages in which the action takes place all look amazing, and the costumes, movements and camera work all add drama to many scenes that are essentially just people sitting in large rooms and arguing. Not being a scholar of feudal Japan, I can't tell how accurate the costumes or blocking are (though I did some searching and discovered that the dialect of Japanese spoken in the show is accurate to the time period). But almost everything looks amazing, even down to the splashes of blood on the shoji doors when assassins try to murder characters at various points.

The one thing that looks a little dodgy, at times, is the scenes onboard ships. One or two of those scenes looked like they were shot on a green screen, which is unfortunate, because you shouldn't be able to notice that. That's a minor quibble, though, because everything else is just so good.

Apparently it was initially planned to be a limited series consisting of these ten episodes, but the reaction has been strong enough that it appears to have been greenlit for a second season, with Sanada returning. I've never read the book or watched the previous adaptation, so I don't know how much of the story this version adapts, but it should be interesting to see what happens next and if it's as well-done. Though I wonder if, rather than continuing Shogun, subsequent seasons shouldn't instead revolve around Clavell's other novels in this series, such as Tai Pan or Noble House.

In any case, despite my initial inertia, I'm glad I gave this show a try. It may not be as compulsive as HBO's We Own This City or The Last of Us, but it's a worthy addition to Hulu's library of prestige TV. If you don't mind blood and subtitles, it's a great watch and well worth the investment of time.